4-tracks, solid gold.
I made the artwork out of a photo that T’Nealle took.

I have a text file with a great plan in it to get it done and released by the 12th, but BBE comes first and I think we’re mixing next week so there’ll be more waiting.

Rackets are the fucking shit. Download this ↑ and then pay some money for this. Pay more than a dollar, though. Paypal and Bandcamp both take a cut. Then go here and watch the video!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then this:

In the past I’ve ripped on $noregazZzm for being a bit stupid and not following my “NZ for NZers” rule or whatever, but that’s not quite correct because a lot of the time I can’t tell which voice is Lisandru and which is Joe. Anyway, their album is actually mean as. “Serval” and “Sex Overload” are my picks. Sometimes they’re a bit stupid (“And when I wake up I’m stuck to the floor, just want to go back to sleep so we can fuck some more” x 1,000 and that song about chads) but they are so pop and the production is the shit. And Lisandru has some kind of Outkast/Andre 3000 flow going on (esp. in “Sex Overload”) and I’M DOWN WITH THAT SHIT.

Production Notes To Steal

Rackets:

So, I’m going to steal the BVs from “Catherine Zita Jones” and I’m going to try to emulate the balls-out rock-tone of the guitars.

$noregazZm:

I guess just everything pop-as-fuck-for-life.

This is my debut rap release. It’s called “Fuck Freddy’s Drop” and I’ve released it as Never.

You can figure out what A art is about, I mean, it only takes a listen. “Each Word” and “Bloome” are my favourite tracks.

OK, I don’t like to define bands by other bands but if you haven’t clicked “download” or “play” or whatever, A art is what Postal Service would be if there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Pay attention: there are no cutesy duets (even though I love duets).

Transparency statement: A art is Dove, who is Futurnari, who I’ve whored before who is now a trans-Tasman friend of mine who played bass in my first two bands and who, with this release and Another Unlikely Hero II, has utterly crushed my desire to make chipmusic ever again.

I recorded, mixed and mastered them today.

I started things off with the most down-beat performanceless charade of my life. My favourite part of my set was when I said “I had to balance how much I wanted to watch you guys watching me watch the computer screen with actually performing.” Derp, oh well. I liked the end of my chip set (which is in the video) and my last track (which isn’t).

Fauxhound was up next. Jos heckled me because I didn’t play chip off the hardware but I countered by walking over to the bar and being way too coolies. My favourite part of his set was the title of the song Drink To Forget and the super atonal build-up at the end of his last song.

Then Dove got onstage/behind the zebra-striped table and dominated everyone. My favourite part of his set was Cellular Automaton (from DNA Computing) because it has no performance so he just pressed play and stood there. Alex Mauer would have been proud.

Fionn filmed this and Jos edited it. The sound is good! Maybe all shows should be at this volume so amateur videographers and budding cell-phone video artists can post better videos to youtube.

Futurnari has released a Sega Megadrive (16-bit for the hip kids) EP entitled DNA Computing and it’s there <- for free.

The piece (I like to pretend it’s one 9:55 song) builds in intensity and complexity, climaxing with this:

Yeah, so get a simple melodic idea, like three notes or something and then just sing about something you know. Don’t worry too much if you can’t make all of the words fit the notes. And don’t be afraid of clichés. I used to shy from them but they work fine. Listen to Deerhunter if you don’t believe it.

Use a bit of simple repetition and remember that sometimes it’s better to repeat a good verse than write another verse that isn’t very good. Also, don’t say “confusion” as part of a sentence because that shit is played out. Um, maybe I’ll write a bit more about that. I don’t know how up on poetry kind of stuff you are, but I think it’s important to understand figurative language. You don’t need to write poetry when you write lyrics but forever rhyming “bat” with “chat” isn’t what you want to be doing either.

So, I guess I want to talk about creativity in lyric writing. This picture is a nice introduction to what I want to say. What poets are meant to be good at is hiding what they’re actually saying in figurative language. When you write a song you should pay attention to this to a moderate extent. That ‘love’ is the most common word in those top 200 songs from that picture kind of points out that people are lazy when it comes to writing lyrics. Saying “I love you” or “I don’t love you” are cheap ways to convey a message. Those two sentences are pretty hollow and don’t actually go very far to showing someone the way you feel. Granted not every occurrence of ‘love’ would have been in one of those contexts but I’d say heaps of them were.

I haven’t read any of these stories but the title of the collection is a good example of what I’m talking about. When you love someone you don’t just start saying “I love you” to them and the converse is also true. “I love/don’t love you” is an example of a cliché that is largely ineffective in lyric writing. “I miss you” is a cliché that is much easier to make sound meaningful but there are myriad ways to say these things that don’t involve the words “love” or “miss”.

With that in mind, however, it is still important to be penetrable. If everyone wrote lyrics like the Mars Volta the music world would be much more of a confusing and confused entity. Don’t be afraid to sing a song about the summer or the beach or driving somewhere or high-school or love or something. Remember, however, that you will be singing the song so make sure you use language that is within your vernacular. If you are singing outside your experience consider changing the viewpoint.

Also: you are a New Zealander and you say “caRn’t, demaRnd, laRst, daRnce” etc. Singing like an American is for Americans, remember?

Another also: inspiration can strike you anywhere. Consider taking some steps to make sure you can record a melody or write a sentence wherever you may be. [EDIT: This is something that comes up in "song writing workshops". I wrote it when I wrote the email but I don't really follow or believe it. Writing down words when they happen to you can be helpful but generally good melodic ideas don't happen to me unless I'm working on music at the moment. Random accidents are few and far between in my experience but YMMV.]

Final also: if nothing is working then write some callow stuff about love and girls and rhyme heaps of stuff with “night”.

This is my favourite photo from the night (Thanks, T’Nealle):

You can see the rest in T’Nealle’s blog post.

Live double-tracking worked really well. Dove and I had trouble discerning whose vocals we were hearing through the monitors – it was slick and Dove also looks like a model.

Go buy their album for anything (even nothing!). Here it is:

Here is the video:

Brian made this video. He is the bestest.

Remember: 47 Diamantes and Tommy Ill with Teen Fortress support at Goodbye Blue Monday in Christchurch, NZ on the 29th of January.

The emo bits are my lyrics.

I’ve got the vocal stems for It’s Summertime, Let’s Only Go To Festivals up on the Teen Fortress website.

You can email any of the addresses I’ve accrued, I’ll figure it out.

I will, or rather, we will be playing a show on the 28th of January at Goodbye Blue Monday (which is in Christchurch just in case someone else has a GBM in their city) with the critically-acclaimed 47 Diamantes. If you follow that link you can download a track / the single from their forthcoming EP Still Friends.

I’ll be performing with Dove, who you all know from those Futurnari posts. I’m looking forward to whenever it is we practise.

I wrote, recorded, mixed and mastered a 10-track pop (power-pop?) album in a bit over a month and you can download it for free from Bandcamp or from the (hilarious) website I made.

The HTML5 player version is 128kb/s and the download version is 320kb/s for you faux-audiophiles out there.

I present to you, another SLEEP500 exclusive, Quake Rape’s In The Club:

Liner notes:
All music created by Simon Goss and an Electribe a week or so ago.
Recorded and produced by Zach.
No mastering because I kind of just forgot about it.

I’ve released a second Never mini-EP. This one isn’t chip, it’s mostly DAW-music with a bit of old synth (MS-10) and some funny out-of-tune steel drum that was at the pirate ship-come-pub in Cornwall.

Anyway, it’s about four minutes of slow, bassy electronic music that I wrote when I was on tour and I produced in about three days of last week.

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